Games involving the art of kicking and channelizing of a ball towards a given area have been played in several nations since ages. According to FIFA, the very earliest form of the game for which there is scientific evidence was an exercise of precisely this skillful technique dating back to the 2nd and 3rd centuries BC in China. It was also called the game of Cuju. The Munich Ethnological Museum in Germany has a Chinese text from around 50 B.C. that talks about the games very similar to soccer. Those games were played between the team of Japan and the team of China.

The Chinese kicked a leather ball, which was filled with hair, on a small field. It is known with enough evidence that a soccer game was played in 611 A.D. in Kyoto, which was the capital of Japan at that time. The Romans also played a game somewhat similar to soccer. In one of the early Olympic Games in Rome, twenty seven men were kept on a side who concluded the game so vigorously that two-thirds of them had to be hospitalized after a game of fifty-minutes. Gradually it spread from Asia to Europe.

Soccer became the most watched and played game within a very short span of time. It became so popular that in the reign of King Edward in England, laws were passed that threatened imprisonment to anyone caught playing soccer. King Edward’s proclamation said: “For as much as there is a great noise in the city caused by hustling over large balls, from which many evils may arise, which God forbids, we command and forbid on behalf of the King, on pain of imprisonment, such game to be used in the city in future.” Soccer was at times, suppressed by the English sheriffs who followed royal orders telling the game as a useless practice. King Henry IV and Henry VIII passed laws against the game of soccer. Queen Elizabeth also declared the punishment of jail for a week, with follow-up church penance for soccer players. But the result of all these prohibitive efforts was something different. Laws failed to stop the sport. In 1681, it received the official sanction in England. By 1800s, the game of soccer became so popular that in certain annual contests in northern and central England, large groups traveled and raged through towns and villages to participate in the soccer events. In 1829, a match in Derbyshire narrated the story of torn coats, lost hats, broken skins, and broken heads.

Rules and orders gradually came to the game of soccer. Standardized rules were known as the Cambridge rules, which were adopted by the major colleges of England. During the 1850s, many clubs were formed to play various forms of football throughout the English-speaking world. Some came up with their own distinct rules. These ongoing efforts contributed to the formation of the Football Association in 1863, at the Freemason’s Tavern in Great Queen Street, London. A board, International Football Association Board (IFAB), was formed in 1886 in Manchester after the meeting of the Football Association. Its main work was to determine the laws of the game. FIFA was formed in Paris in 1904. The growing popularity of soccer at international level led to the admittance of FIFA representatives to the International Football Association Board in 1913. Popularity of the game kept surging up and today, soccer is the most watched and played sport at professional level all over the world.